UNCHR chief Antonio Guterres marked World Refugee Day by welcoming back civilians who fled Liberia's civil war and urging the world to help millions across the planet heading home to a bleak future.
The total number of refugees in the world - 8.4 million people - is at its lowest in more than a quarter of a century, according to UN figures. More than 6 million have returned home over the last four years.
But in Liberia, as in other post-conflict states, many refugees return to towns that have been torn to pieces, where schools and hospitals barely function, and where family members may be missing.
"Our experience shows that during the five years after a conflict is solved, half of the countries go back into conflict again," Guterres told reporters near the border between Liberia and Sierra Leone on Tuesday.
"Why? Because the foundations were not laid for a stable situation and for a sound economic development," he said. Liberians returning home said they were happy to be back, but despaired over picking up the pieces of their lives.
"I feel happy because there is no place like home," said Momoh Kamara, 20, a high school student who fled Liberia to neighbouring Sierra Leone when his home was attacked towards the end of Liberia's war in 2002. "The only thing I am disappointed about is that I don't know where my family is. I don't know where to start now. I am so worried I don't where to go," he said after crossing the Mano River bridge straddling Liberia's palm-forested border. Images of child soldiers high on drugs shocked the world during Liberia's conflict and intertwined wars in West Africa.
"Liberians have decided to move away from war, to embrace peace and to look forward to a future of hope and promise," Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who also witnessed refugees returning from Sierra Leone, told reporters.
But Liberia, once home to one of the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world, is still without running water or electricity two years after the war ended and job prospects for legions of unemployed youths are dim. Kamara was one of 125 people from eight refugee camps in Sierra Leone crossing back into Liberia on Tuesday.
Their names and baggage numbers on pink slips of paper stapled to UN T-shirts, the returnees are among 14,000 people to have come back to Liberia through Bo Waterside since October 2004, aided by UNCHR.
Guterres climbed into a canvas-covered truck and sat with the returnees on their journey to a transit centre in Sinje, a section to the transition between relief and development, to rebuilding societies which have been ripped apart by violence."
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